In a year of discourse defined by safe, middle-of-the-road cinematic gambles, it takes a truly visionary piece of art to hold a mirror up to our collective societal trauma. I am speaking, of course, about "Enola Holmes 3." When the screen went to black at an exclusive first-look screening in a boutique West Hollywood screening room last Tuesday, you could hear a pin drop. We had all just witnessed Millie Bobby Brown return to the role of Sherlock's little sister, but this was no longer the cozy, winsome romp of my youth. This was a frisky and grown-up installment, a harrowing, unflinching meditation on what it means to be a 19th-century teen detective navigating the brutal realities of the modern content slate.
Make no mistake: this is the role of a lifetime. During a recent two-hour lunch at Nobu Malibu with a senior publicist whose name I am not at liberty to disclose but who definitely has Ted Sarandos's personal cell phone number, it became clear to me just how much was riding on this picture. The studio was terrified. Audiences, they feared, might not be ready for an Enola who is no longer a child, but an adult who occasionally makes prolonged, knowing eye contact with the camera about the crushing weight of existential dread. Director Philip Barantini, fresh off the gritty indie "Adolescence," was given the green light to do the unthinkable: make a third movie in a highly lucrative intellectual property that is roughly four percent darker than the second one.
When I briefly cornered Barantini at a Vanity Fair mixer last month, I asked him about his decision to strip away the cozily pastoral charms that defined the earlier films in favor of this bleak, uncompromising vision. "We are living in an era of unprecedented global anxiety," I told him over a plate of artisanal sliders, projecting my own profound intellect onto his commercial assignment. He nodded, clearly struck by my insight, before his reps quietly ushered him toward the exit. But the understanding between us was palpable. He had taken a delightfully plucky whodunit and infused it with the raw, bleeding edge of a PG-13 rating.
We need to talk about the sheer, unadulterated bravery of the C-suite. It is easy for the armchair critics to demand original, boundary-pushing cinema from the comfort of their cheap apartments. It is entirely another thing to be a streaming executive bravely standing in front of a whiteboard, looking at the tracking numbers for a plucky British gumshoe cinematic universe, and asking the hard questions about global scalability.
When we first discussed aging up the character, we knew we were risking everything except our guaranteed baseline of sixty million algorithmic completion views within the first weekend.
The rollout for this film has been a masterclass in risk management, bravely asking subscribers to click on a massive, unskippable banner at the top of their television screens. It is a testament to the power of the medium that an enterprise of this scale can still feel so intensely personal to me, a man with a mortgage and a verified social media presence.
As we head into awards season, I fully expect the academy to ignore this masterpiece in favor of whatever traditional, three-hour historical biopic happens to be making the rounds. The establishment is always afraid of the truly avant-garde. But for those of us who understand the grueling, trench-warfare realities of the red carpet press tour, "Enola Holmes 3" is a revelation. It is a grown-up film for grown-up times, and if you cannot see the geopolitical resonance in a teenager solving a quaint Victorian kidnapping, well, perhaps you simply aren't paying attention to the discourse.